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This is what my author Jessica Shattuck recently wrote in the New York Times. She goes on: "Understanding why and how this woman I knew and loved was swept up in a movement that became synonymous with evil has been, for me, a lifelong question."

Shattuck's new novel "The Women in the Castle" takes up the question of how ordinary people respond to a regime that commits horrific atrocities — who resists, who is complicit, and why?

She follows three women through the war, and through their attempts to rebuild their lives in a time of peace.